Quick note - sorry about Marc's audio. With recording three people, the mic setup wasn't optimal for Marc and his daughter. We'll do better next time. But Marc's audio isn't the important bits of the episode anyway. Enjoy!

The flushing toilet is the most important machine in your house and the one you think about least. We use one six to eight times a day for our whole lives without a second thought, which, when you flush it through, is a remarkable engineering achievement.
Rome had running-water toilets two thousand years ago, watched the idea swirl down the drain when the empire fell, and didn't pick it back up until the 1590's, when Queen Elizabeth's "saucy godson" Sir John Harington invented the first proper flush toilet. Things start to flow after a Scottish watchmaker invents the S-bend in 1775, a Victorian plumber called Thomas Crapper builds his name into a coincidence too perfect to waste, and the Great Stink of 1858 finally drives Parliament to build the sewers that become the single biggest reason most of us are alive. Then we wash up in Japan, where TOTO treats the toilet as serious technology, and we close on the billions of people who still do not have a safe toilet at all.
Special guest: a twelve-year-old history buff, a genuine Tudor expert, who carries the Harington section of our story.

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